All news in category “Vendor and Hyperscaler Watch”

💼 AWS announced general availability of Reserved Instances and Savings Plans (RISP) Group Sharing, a Billing and Cost Management feature that gives organizations granular control over how commitments are distributed across accounts and business units. Administrators create groups using AWS Cost Categories and choose Prioritized or Restricted sharing to align savings or enforce isolation. The feature is available in all Regions except AWS GovCloud (US) and China and can be enabled from Billing preferences.

🔐 AWS Secrets Manager introduces managed external secrets, a default-enabled feature that automates rotation for third-party SaaS credentials using provider-supported rotation strategies. The service removes the need to build and maintain rotation Lambda functions by enforcing a vendor-prescribed secret format and offering multiple rotation approaches. An onboarding guide enables any SaaS provider to join as a partner and publish prescriptive rotation guidance. At launch, the feature lists Salesforce, BigID, and Snowflake, and is available in all Regions where Secrets Manager operates.

🔍 Amazon EKS now delivers enhanced container network observability with granular, network-related metrics and integrated console visualizations to help teams monitor and troubleshoot Kubernetes networking on AWS. Powered by Amazon CloudWatch Network Flow Monitor, the capabilities reveal cross-AZ flows, top-talkers, retransmissions, and retransmission timeouts for faster root cause analysis. Teams can ingest metrics into their preferred observability stacks and use the console views to eliminate blind spots during incidents. These features are available in all commercial Regions where CloudWatch Network Flow Monitor is offered.

📥 AWS announced general availability of its new E-Invoice delivery capability that lets customers connect their SAP Ariba and Coupa procurement portals to AWS to retrieve purchase orders and deliver PO-matched invoices back on the same day. Customers can onboard via the AWS Billing and Cost Management console and track invoice delivery status in both systems. The feature is available in all AWS Regions except GovCloud (US) and the China regions. This streamlines invoice processing and reduces manual reconciliation.

🆕 Amazon DynamoDB now supports composite primary keys composed of up to eight attributes in global secondary indexes. Partition and sort keys can each include up to four attributes, removing the need to create synthetic concatenated keys and perform backfills. Multi-attribute keys improve data distribution and uniqueness while enabling left-to-right filtering on sort key attributes. The capability is available at no extra cost across all AWS Regions and can be created via the Console, CLI, SDKs, or API.

🔒 AWS Site-to-Site VPN introduces VPN Concentrator, a managed feature that simplifies multi-site connectivity for distributed enterprises. It enables customers to aggregate up to 100 low-bandwidth remote sites (recommended for deployments of 25+ sites, each under 100 Mbps) behind a single attachment to AWS Transit Gateway. The concentrator reduces operational overhead, improves bandwidth utilization, and lowers per-site VPN costs.

🔒 AWS Network Firewall now supports managed rule groups from AWS Partners, enabling customers to deploy partner-maintained, automatically updated security rules directly into firewall policies. You can subscribe and deploy these pre-configured rule groups via the AWS Network Firewall console or through AWS Marketplace, with consolidated billing and potential long-term pricing benefits. Available sellers include Check Point, Fortinet, Infoblox, Lumen, Rapid7, ThreatSTOP, and Trend Micro in all AWS commercial regions where the services are offered.

🔒 Amazon Web Services expanded Amazon Bedrock Guardrails to cover code-related use cases, enabling detection and prevention of harmful content embedded in code. The update applies content filters, denied topics, and sensitive information filters to code elements such as comments, variable and function names, and string literals. The enhancements also include prompt leakage detection in the standard tier and are available in all supported AWS Regions via the console and APIs.

📈 AWS has introduced a Cost Efficiency metric in the AWS Cost Optimization Hub to help organizations measure the percentage of cloud spend that can be optimized. The metric divides aggregated estimated monthly savings from rightsizing, idle, and commitment recommendations by optimizable spend and refreshes daily. It surfaces trend data so teams can benchmark performance, set cost-savings goals, and observe improvements or regressions as resources are changed. Cost Efficiency is available in all Regions where the hub is supported and setup guidance is provided in the user guide and accompanying blog.

🛠️ The new AWS CloudFormation Language Server brings context-aware authoring, validation, and drift-aware deployment views into supported IDEs through the AWS Toolkit. It provides auto-complete, schema validation, policy checks via CloudFormation Guard, and deployment validation directly within the editor. The Language Server flags invalid resource properties, missing IAM permission requirements, and configuration drift so developers can detect syntax, permission, and configuration issues before deployment and move safely from design to production.

🚀 Amazon ECS Managed Instances now lets you configure a scale-in delay so you can better align instance terminations with workload patterns and business requirements. You can set the scaleInAfter parameter to any value up to 60 minutes, or set it to -1 to disable automatic infrastructure optimization and allow instances to remain until they are patched after 14 days. Configure scaleInAfter when creating or updating an ECS Managed Instances capacity provider via the ECS API, console, SDKs, CDK, or CloudFormation. This capability is available in all commercial AWS Regions and helps teams balance cost optimization against availability.

🔒 AWS now enables native cross-region connectivity for AWS PrivateLink, allowing Interface VPC endpoints to reach supported AWS services hosted in other Regions within the same partition. Service consumers can access S3, Route 53, ECR and more via private IPs in their VPCs without cross-region peering or traversing the public internet. This simplifies global private networking and supports data residency and security requirements.

🔍 An intermittent outage at Cloudflare on Nov. 18 briefly disrupted many major websites and forced some customers to pivot DNS and routing to preserve availability. Those provisional workarounds may have exposed origin infrastructure by bypassing edge protections such as WAFs and bot management. Security teams should review OWASP-related logs, emergency DNS changes, and any ad hoc services or devices introduced during the outage. The incident underscores single-vendor risk and the need for formal fallback plans.

🔐 AWS now permits developers to use their existing AWS Management Console sign-in credentials for programmatic access via the AWS CLI, AWS Tools for PowerShell, and AWS SDKs after a brief browser-based authentication flow. The aws login command in AWS CLI v2.32.0 and later obtains automatically rotated, short-lived credentials to reduce reliance on long-term access keys. This capability is available in all commercial AWS regions and aims to streamline local development setup while improving security posture.

📈 AWS Cost Explorer now extends forecasting to 18 months and uses upgraded machine learning that can analyze up to 36 months of historical data (previously 6 months) to surface seasonal patterns and long-term growth trends. Two of these improvements are generally available, while AI-powered, explainable forecasts are offered in public preview in the console. The 18-month horizon is also exposed via the GetCostForecast API, enabling finance and engineering teams to improve annual budgeting, surface optimization opportunities, and present forecasts with greater stakeholder confidence.

🚀 Amazon Bedrock now supports importing custom weights for gpt-oss-120b and gpt-oss-20b, allowing customers to bring tuned OpenAI GPT OSS models into a fully managed, serverless environment. This capability eliminates the need to manage infrastructure or model serving while enabling deployment of text-to-text models for reasoning, agentic, and developer tasks. gpt-oss-120b is optimized for production and high-reasoning use cases; gpt-oss-20b targets lower-latency or specialized scenarios. The feature is generally available in US‑East (N. Virginia).

💡 Amazon Q Developer now includes enhanced cost management features that let users analyze costs across broader Cloud Financial Management domains with advanced analytics. Users can ask open-ended questions about historical and forecasted costs, optimization recommendations, commitment utilization, anomalies, budgets, free tier usage, and product attributes. Q explores data, forms hypotheses, performs calculations, and shows the API calls and console links used for transparency.

🚀 AWS Network Load Balancer now supports weighted target groups, letting you distribute traffic across multiple target groups with configurable weights from 0 to 999. This enables progressive deployment strategies such as Blue-Green and Canary deployments, application migration, and A/B testing while supporting instance, IP address, and ALB targets. The capability is available across AWS commercial and GovCloud regions at no additional charge; standard NLB Capacity Unit (LCU) pricing applies.

🗂️ Amazon FSx for Windows File Server now supports File Server Resource Manager (FSRM), enabling file classification, file screening, folder-level quotas, and storage reporting for managed Windows file systems. FSRM events can be published to Amazon CloudWatch Logs or streamed to Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose and used to trigger AWS Lambda for automated responses and workflows. The capability is available today at no additional cost for new file systems across all Regions where FSx is offered; existing file systems will gain support during a scheduled maintenance window.

🔍 Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (Amazon MSK) now exposes topic listings and detailed topic views directly in the MSK console and via three new public APIs. You can browse and search topics within a cluster, quickly review replication settings and partition counts, and drill into per-topic configuration and partition-level metrics without installing Kafka admin clients. The new ListTopics, DescribeTopic, and DescribeTopicPartitions APIs are available through the AWS CLI and SDKs; these features require MSK Provisioned clusters running Kafka 3.6+ and appropriate IAM permissions.